Many patients require respiratory support from a mechanical breathing system. A mechanical breathing system may be a ventilator for patients that need assistance breathing or it may be an anesthetic delivery device. A ventilator is connected to the patient via a series of specially designed modular components, each component being a tube. The ventilator applies a positive pressure to the airway of the patient. Once the natural resistance of the patient's airway is overcome by this positive pressure, the patient's lungs begin to fill with the supplied medical gases. The supplied medical gases may be air or may be a specific designated mixture of medical gases that provide some therapeutic support to the patient. This specific mixture of gases may include anesthetic agent or supplemental gases such as oxygen, helium, nitrogen, or nitrous oxide. During ventilatory support, it is desirable to monitor the flow of the medical gas within the ventilator system as well as the composition of the gas. This complex monitoring requires sophisticated mathematical models of the mechanical breathing system.
The mechanical breathing system has a plurality of modular components that may be linked together to create the connection between the ventilator and the patient. The use of disposable components increases sanitation by eliminating the need to sterilize medical components between uses. Alternatively, reusable components are available that must be sterilized between uses by a process such as autoclaving. Each modular component provides its own advantages and/or abilities and as such, the clinician can assemble the proper series of modular components for the patient's needs. For example, one such modular component may be a gas flow sensor/sampler, such as the D-lite available from GE Healthcare that has different models for use with adult and infant patients. As the clinician adds to or changes the modular components being used, the mathematical models used by the ventilator controls must be adjusted for the new components and the whole system optimized.
Similar challenges and concerns face clinicians in critical care situations where the patient is receiving an anesthetic agent. Anesthetic delivery machines comprise similar modular components creating the connection between the machine and the patient. Changing these components requires changing the mathematical models and optimizing the system controls.
Therapeutic error can result from the inattentive reconfiguration of a mechanical breathing system. System performance can be compromised when the operator fails to identify critical characteristics of modular components to the system prior to use. Normally, once the clinician has selected and assembled the necessary modular components, the clinician must tell a system controller which components are in use so that the controller knows the appropriate mathematical models to apply. Alternatively, the clinician must run a system “checkout” procedure by which a test flow is used to determine the characteristics of the mechanical breathing system. Running the checkout enables the system controller to get the resistance and compliance associated with the assembled breathing circuit. These parameters affect the system controller dynamics and alarm manager internal calculations. Significant negative effects are possible if the system assumes the incorrect parameters because the ventilation must be individually optimized for each patient's needs. Therefore, it is desirable for a system that automatically transfers detailed information about modular components to the controller for the mechanical breathing system with which the components are used.
An alternative problem facing clinicians of a critical care transport team is the need for a means to automatically transfer mechanical breathing system parameters and patient physiological trend information between mechanical breathing systems during transport. When transferring a critical care patient to a new location within the hospital, data pertaining to the patient's mechanical breathing system settings can be easily lost or it is time-consuming for the clinician to duplicate this data on the new mechanical breathing system. Therefore, it is desirable in the field of critical care transport to have a patient connection that stores data pertaining to the mechanical breathing system to be used when the patient is switched to a new mechanical breathing system.